Keyword Research Services

Every good SEO campaign should start with keyword research. It ensures that the whole campaign won't later prove to be worthless in terms of traffic and ROI, because when we do keyword research, we pick the keywords (or phrases) that real users of the search engines actually search for.

The process

We start from brainstorming good key phrases related to your site's topic which are likely to be searched for. At this stage, it is quite common to communicate with our clients and ask their opinion about this or that targeted key phrase. If you've got a PPC (pay per click) campaign set up in Google or Overture, we may ask your permission to access your archives, because they can offer you and us tremendous help in choosing the most effective keywords. We also look at your web statistics to extract useful information from the archived reports.

When the preliminary list of keywords is compiled, we run each suggested term through a standard procedure. We check the number of daily searches using Wordtracker |. Terms showing 20 to 100 daily searches are very good and definitely worth the effort; terms showing more than 100 daily searches are often over-competitive, but if your website is old, has many incoming links, and from its current conditions we can see that it is a highly authoritative site, we will most likely take up such terms. Terms showing less than 20 searches per day can still be useful, especially if your PPC statistics prove it; and it should be remembered that Wordtracker's results (just like any other tool's output) are very inaccurate and can only give you an approximate idea on how much this or that keyword is worth.

We then check the competitiveness of each targeted phrase by checking the overall number of entries in Google, the allintitle: search and the allinanchor: search. It's not a hugely accurate measure of the competitiveness of the keyword, but it helps us estimate the chances of acquiring good positions in the engines because we also take into account the current SEO conditions of your website, its authority, its age and the modifications we are planning to apply to it.

The allintitle: advanced operator can be used in Google to get the number of pages using your targeted keywords in their <title> tag. The allinanchor: operator gives you the number of pages using those keywords in the anchor text of their links. Both parameters help us define how many websites actually compete for these keywords.

Finally, we compile and send you our keyword research report containing the following information:

• The keyword (phrase).
• The number of daily searches according to Wordtracker.
• Your position in Google for the keyword (phrase) at the date of the report (if any). Sometimes we will add your current positions in Yahoo! and MSN search engines, as well. We check these positions manually by actually doing searches in the engines.
• The number of pages competing for the keyword (phrase) according to Google.
• The number of pages containing the targeted keyword (phrase) in their <title> tags (the allintitle: search).
• The number of pages containing the targeted keyword (phrase) in the anchor text of their links (the allinanchor: search).

Then we write detailed explanations of the elements of the report that include our estimations of competitiveness of the chosen keywords and the chances of the client's website being found. We can also put the chosen keywords in different colours to indicate their levels of competitiveness and usefulness. Each level is described in detail in the legend.

After that, we are ready to come to the final agreement with our client on what keywords to work with and how to distribute them among the stages of the SEO campaign.